A night in the life of... the Arsenal defence

1.00-1.07am: Per Mertesacker is back at school, in Germany. He is dropped off by his parents, back to how they looked 25 years ago. He’s six years old, he hangs up his big, puffy coat and takes his satchel with him. From the satchel he takes out his packed lunch, and even in his dream state he finds it odd that it’s his usual pre-match meal of chicken and rice, with a sports drink in a foil packet.

He then notices the teacher is asking the children for his homework, telling them all that they’ve had the whole weekend to work on it, and that it has to be perfect. The headmaster - once a professor - walks in, and stands just under the door frame arch. Mertesacker feels a familiar sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. He looks inside his satchel, and there’s a couple of children’s books, but no textbook, and no book of his own.

Panicking, he rifles around the satchel, in his desk drawer, on the floor, looking for where the book might be. He looks for something to copy from the children around him, but the teacher has taken their books in to be marked already. The teacher is standing in front of him now, repeatedly asking why he hasn’t done the homework. Just as he’s about to protest his innocence, he wakes up.

2.02-2.03am: Laurent Koscielny is reliving his first date with his wife. He’s full of nerves. He stands in front of his wardrobe, working his way through suits, t-shirts, weird footballer denim, trainers, shiny shoes. There are skinny ties, leather jackets. Some reasonable clothes, some absolute disgraces. He chooses something smart-ish, but nothing over the top.

He goes to brush his teeth, and put on some deodorant, awkwardly applying it under his already buttoned-up shirt. Then he looks for his car keys, grabs them off his bedside table and gets into his car in the drive. Because the subconscious is barely comprehensible, it takes about three seconds for Koscielny to drive from his home to his favourite restaurant in central London.

Koscielny steadies himself in the car, the nerves rising up from the pit of his stomach. His palms sweat. He checks his flies are done, and he takes one last look in the car’s mirror to practice a relaxed, charming smile. He flashes a grin, and one tooth falls out. It plops into his lap, weirdly bloodless. He looks up again, and another two come out, then the rest in quick succession. As he starts to wonder how to get to a dentist before the date, his mind racing, he wakes up.

4.30-6.30am: Hector Bellerin is playing football with his friends after school in Barcelona. Even at a young age, it’s apparent just how much better he is than the rest of them. While he’d become a defender at Arsenal, as the most talented - and quickest - player in his group of friends, he plays up front or on the wing. Really, everyone knows he’s too good to make the competition fair or meaningful, but it’s tradition for him to relax and play with his friends, regardless of how mediocre they all are.

Bellerin scores four goals in four minutes, with his friends admiring his tricks and audacious attempts to show off and impress. And then, they start laughing at him. Even when he scores again, they keep laughing at him, and Bellerin doesn’t understand what’s going down. He asks his friends why they’re all laughing, and is on the verge of becoming irrepressibly furious when they double up with mirth but refuse to say anything. When they’re all laughing so hard they can barely control the rest of their bodies, he looks down. Bellerin finally understands why they are all laughing - he is completely naked. He wakes up.

7:42-8.15am: There’s a shout, then two shouts, then three, and a scream. Nacho Monreal looks up to his left, down the road, to see a gang of five or six people running in his direction. Instinctively, he feels like they’re racing towards him and he sprints away. The streetlights guide him towards a main road, but one by one, ahead of him, they start to go out. Each pair of lights, either side of him, look like rungs on a ladder, but they cut out, making dramatic, chopping noises as they turn off.

He darts down a side road, and after a few steps, the side road turns into a tiny alley. Slipping through a door in the side of the wall, he somehow finds himself in a forest. His sight changes to night vision, and he looks behind to see a pack of people still chasing, their eyes enormous and illuminated like bush babies. He swings back around to the path ahead of him, he stumbles and falls to the floor. He can feel the pack rushing towards him as he is prone and helpless. He wakes up.

10.30am: Ahead of the match against Barcelona, as they are going through their defensive drills, the back four all discuss their nightmares from last night. Petr Cech walks along and overhears the discussion, and says he had a bout of sleep paralysis too, with a tiny gremlin looming over him. All of them know what it means now.